Playing with the various VoIP solutions is a bit of a hobby of mine, so allow me to share some of what I have learned:
Vonage is a great company, they have area codes in a lot of places, and they also support number portability. The downside is you're stuck using their equipment (cisco ata-186). It's a nice box, doesn't require a computer, provides a plug for normal phones, and works quite well behind a Linux firewall. If that's what you're looking for, then by all means, go with Vonage. I currently have a personal line, and a business line w/ fax line through them.
Packet8 is another company where you're stuck with their equipment. I've heard of problems with their service, but I have yet to experiance anything. The price is right, and the quality is good enough, and they also support lots of area codes. I currently have a personal line through them, but I've only had it for about 4 months.
iConnectHere is another one that supports lots of area codes. The quality is ok, but I had lots of lag issues with them. The price is pretty good, but you have to supply your own equipment. The good news is it works well with most sip devices (I've used an ata-186 with it, as well as a few soft phones). You'll hav problems using softphones behind a firewall though, but the good news is, it integrates pretty well with Asterisk, the open source pbx software. I used their service for a few months, but I no longer have it, the lag issues were too much for me.
VoicePulse is my current favorite solution. Aside from SIP, they also support IAX (via their VoicePulse Connect! service). With IAX, it integrates extremely well with Asterisk even behind firewalls. They have a pretty good pricing plan, and you get all your incoming minutes for free. You can add as many phone numbers as you would like, but the only problem with their service is their limited area code availability, which will hopefully get better over time. They support multiple inbound and outbound calls simultaniously, and several codecs, so you can balance your requirments of bandwidth vs. voice quality. VoicePulse also has a service that's more like what Vonage offers, but I haven't tried that. As I'm sure you've guessed by now, I'm currently using the VoicePulse Connect! service as my PSTN gateway for my Asterisk PBX, and so far it's been working remarkably well.
My team & I just got done building some billing software for one of our customers, and OpenOffice.org's XML based documents turned out to be perfect for generating reports. Our customer is able to open up the document and change the formatting of any report at will, and then we have some Ruby code on the backend that parses the XML document, fills in all the real data from the database and then uses the CLI interface to OpenOffice to render the document as postscript. It was a quick easy way to get powerful report generation with a format that non-technical people could edit that required just a little bit of glue code on the backend, and it's the XML format that made it all possible.
While BGP would surly be a good solution to the problem, it's highly unlikly that consumer grade broadband providers could be convinced to give their customer a BGP feed.
On top of that problem, a majority of these types of providers use non-portable IP space which would make the BGP feed useless anyway.
According to various types of relativity, going faster than the speed of light violates the concept of linear time, so we would be receiving signals before they were sent (looking at it simplisticly, there are other "things" that prevent it from happening); however, I would assume that if this thing works at all, it modifies space-time such that from our perspective it appears to be going faster than light whereas from the pespective of the signal, it is travelling slower than the speed of light (probably close to it though).
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Playing with the various VoIP solutions is a bit of a hobby of mine, so allow me to share some of what I have learned:
Vonage is a great company, they have area codes in a lot of places, and they also support number portability. The downside is you're stuck using their equipment (cisco ata-186). It's a nice box, doesn't require a computer, provides a plug for normal phones, and works quite well behind a Linux firewall. If that's what you're looking for, then by all means, go with Vonage. I currently have a personal line, and a business line w/ fax line through them.
Packet8 is another company where you're stuck with their equipment. I've heard of problems with their service, but I have yet to experiance anything. The price is right, and the quality is good enough, and they also support lots of area codes. I currently have a personal line through them, but I've only had it for about 4 months.
iConnectHere is another one that supports lots of area codes. The quality is ok, but I had lots of lag issues with them. The price is pretty good, but you have to supply your own equipment. The good news is it works well with most sip devices (I've used an ata-186 with it, as well as a few soft phones). You'll hav problems using softphones behind a firewall though, but the good news is, it integrates pretty well with Asterisk, the open source pbx software. I used their service for a few months, but I no longer have it, the lag issues were too much for me.
VoicePulse is my current favorite solution. Aside from SIP, they also support IAX (via their VoicePulse Connect! service). With IAX, it integrates extremely well with Asterisk even behind firewalls. They have a pretty good pricing plan, and you get all your incoming minutes for free. You can add as many phone numbers as you would like, but the only problem with their service is their limited area code availability, which will hopefully get better over time. They support multiple inbound and outbound calls simultaniously, and several codecs, so you can balance your requirments of bandwidth vs. voice quality. VoicePulse also has a service that's more like what Vonage offers, but I haven't tried that. As I'm sure you've guessed by now, I'm currently using the VoicePulse Connect! service as my PSTN gateway for my Asterisk PBX, and so far it's been working remarkably well.
I hope that helps!
1) Threaten legal action against the entire market.
2) ???
3) Profit!
Perhaps the underwear gnomes have taken control of SCO.
My team & I just got done building some billing software for one of our customers, and OpenOffice.org's XML based documents turned out to be perfect for generating reports. Our customer is able to open up the document and change the formatting of any report at will, and then we have some Ruby code on the backend that parses the XML document, fills in all the real data from the database and then uses the CLI interface to OpenOffice to render the document as postscript. It was a quick easy way to get powerful report generation with a format that non-technical people could edit that required just a little bit of glue code on the backend, and it's the XML format that made it all possible.
While BGP would surly be a good solution to the problem, it's highly unlikly that consumer grade broadband providers could be convinced to give their customer a BGP feed.
On top of that problem, a majority of these types of providers use non-portable IP space which would make the BGP feed useless anyway.
According to various types of relativity, going faster than the speed of light violates the concept of linear time, so we would be receiving signals before they were sent (looking at it simplisticly, there are other "things" that prevent it from happening); however, I would assume that if this thing works at all, it modifies space-time such that from our perspective it appears to be going faster than light whereas from the pespective of the signal, it is travelling slower than the speed of light (probably close to it though).